“I will—­” as he paused on the name, as if he could not speak it just then.  “She was so glad to have us go to church together.  She wanted to come herself—­so much.”

He pressed the small gloved hand held out to him.  He knew that Ruth idealized him far beyond his worth—­he could read it in her gaze, which was all but reverential.  He said to himself, as he turned away, that a man never had so many motives to be true to the girl he was to marry.  To bring the first shade of distrust into this little sister’s tender eyes would be punishment enough for any disloyalty, no matter what the cause might be.

The wedding was to be at six o’clock.  There was nothing about the whole affair, as it had been planned by Roberta, with his full assent, to make it resemble any event of the sort in which he had ever taken part.  Not one consideration of custom or of vogue had had weight with her, if it differed from her carefully wrought-out views of what should be.  Her ruling idea had been to make it all as simple and sincere as possible, to invite no guests outside her large family and his small one except such personal friends as were peculiarly dear to both.  When Richard had been asked to submit his list of these, he had been taken aback to find how pitifully few people he could put upon it.  Half a dozen college classmates, a small number of fellow clubmen—­these painstakingly considered from more than one standpoint—­the Cartwrights, his cousins, whom he really knew but indifferently well; two score easily covered the number of those whom by any stretch of the imagination he could call friends.  The long roll of his fashionable acquaintance he dismissed as out of the question.  If he had been married in church there would have been several hundreds of these who must unquestionably have been bidden; but since Roberta wanted as she put it, “only those who truly care for us,” he could but choose those who seemed to come somewhere near that ideal.  To be quite honest, he was aware that his real friends were among those who could not be bidden to his marriage.  The crippled children in the hospitals; the suffering poor who would send him their blessing when they read in to-morrow’s paper that he was married; the shop-people in Eastman who knew him for the kindest employer they had ever had:—­these were they who “truly cared”; and the knowledge was warm at his heart, as with a ruthless hand he scored off names of the mighty in the world of society and finance.

“Dick, my boy, you’ve grown—­you’ve grown!” was his grandfather’s comment, when Richard, with a rueful laugh, had shown the old man the finished list, upon which, well toward the top, had been the names of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Carson.  Of Hugh Benson, as best man, Matthew Kendrick heartily approved.  “You’ve chosen the nugget of pure gold, Dick,” he said, “where you might have been expected to take one with considerable alloy.  He’s worth all the others put together.”